Formal Languages and Automata Theory
We develop a formal perspective on how regular expression matching works in Java, a popular representative of the category of regex-directed matching engines. In particular, we define an automata model which captures all the aspects needed…
In a recent paper (M. Barash, A. Okhotin, "Defining contexts in context-free grammars", LATA 2012), the authors introduced an extension of the context-free grammars equipped with an operator for referring to the left context of the…
The decidability of equivalence for three important classes of tree transducers is discussed. Each class can be obtained as a natural restriction of deterministic macro tree transducers (MTTs): (1) no context parameters, i.e., top-down tree…
The article surveys some decidability results for DPDAs on infinite words (omega-DPDA). We summarize some recent results on the decidability of the regularity and the equivalence problem for the class of weak omega-DPDAs. Furthermore, we…
Eilenberg correspondence, based on the concept of syntactic monoids, relates varieties of regular languages with pseudovarieties of finite monoids. Various modifications of this correspondence related more general classes of regular…
The equivalence of finite automata and regular expressions dates back to the seminal paper of Kleene on events in nerve nets and finite automata from 1956. In the present paper we tour a fragment of the literature and summarize results on…
We present a survey of the saturation method for model-checking pushdown systems.
We introduce two generalizations of synchronizability to automata with transitions weighted in an arbitrary semiring K=(K,+,*,0,1). (or equivalently, to finite sets of matrices in K^nxn.) Let us call a matrix A location-synchronizing if…
The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We…
The 14th International Conference Automata and Formal Languages (AFL 2014) was held in Szeged, Hungary, from the 27th to the 29th of May, 2014. The conference was organized by the Department of Foundations of Computer Science of the…
A deterministic finite automaton is said to be synchronizing if it has a reset word, i.e. a word that brings all states of the automaton to a particular one. We prove that it is a PSPACE-complete problem to check whether the language of…
We prove that a minimal automaton has a minimal adjacency matrix rank and a minimal adjacency matrix nullity using equitable partition (from graph spectra theory) and Nerode partition (from automata theory). This result naturally introduces…
It has been conjectured in 2011 by Brzozowski et al. that if $K$ and $L$ are factor-free regular languages over a binary alphabet having state complexity $m$ and $n$, resp, then the state complexity of $K\cup L$ is at most…
Automata play important roles in wide area of computing and the growth of multicores calls for their efficient parallel implementation. Though it is known in theory that we can perform the computation of a finite automaton in parallel by…
We present a disambiguation algorithm for weighted automata. The algorithm admits two main stages: a pre-disambiguation stage followed by a transition removal stage. We give a detailed description of the algorithm and the proof of its…
This work builds on the notion of breadth-first signature of infinite trees and (prefix-closed) languages introduced by the authors in a previous work. We focus here on periodic signatures, a case coming from the study of rational base…
We consider the state-minimisation problem for weighted and probabilistic automata. We provide a numerically stable polynomial-time minimisation algorithm for weighted automata, with guaranteed bounds on the numerical error when run with…
We investigate the quantifier alternation hierarchy in first-order logic on finite words. Levels in this hierarchy are defined by counting the number of quantifier alternations in formulas. We prove that one can decide membership of a…
We study the problem of synchronization of automata with random inputs. We present a series of automata such that the expected number of steps until synchronization is exponential in the number of states. At the same time, we show that the…
Inspired by distributed algorithms, we introduce a new class of finite graph automata that recognize precisely the graph languages definable in monadic second-order logic. For the cases of words and trees, it has been long known that the…